Meghana Mysore is the author of the new story collection Let All Our Ghosts Depart. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Randolph College.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories in your new collection?
A: I wrote these stories over a period of eight or nine years. Some of them began in a fiction workshop when I was a junior in college, so they've been brewing in me for a while, and it's very gratifying to have all these stories, some older and some newer, published together as a collection.
Q: How was the book’s title--also the title of one of the stories--chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Ghosts recur, in one form or another, throughout these stories. Sometimes, they manifest physically, residing in a broken-down car, and sometimes they're psychological or emotional.
Like many of us do, my characters carry generational trauma and the weight of their pasts with them, and they don't know (as the speaker in Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" says) where to put it all down.
So the “ghosts” in the title speak to this weight, and to the chorus of voices that surround my characters, the voices of those who have passed on, who are no longer present.
But some of the ghosts are benevolent, too—speaking to my characters and moving them to connect with the people around them, with the world, with the playful childlike parts of the selves they may have lost.
Q: The writer Karen E. Bender said of the book, “Meghana Mysore's glorious debut explores experiences of the Indian-American diaspora with beauty and precision and humor; she writes about grief and longing like no one else.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think this is a generous and beautiful description, and gets towards many of the things I wanted to do with this collection. It is a book about grief, and also what’s on the other side of grief — what possibilities for aliveness might live across from it.
And I wanted to bring more complexity and other emotions to representations of Indian Americans in literature; there is so much great literature about Indian Americans and I think there could be more nuanced portraits of immigrant parents and their children, and more tonal variety in these portraits, ranging from humor to sadness and absurdity and everything in between.
So that’s what I was aiming for with this collection; some stories feel more somber and some are wild and playful and some are darkly humorous, and in every story, I’m trying to be real and honest and portray my characters as bold, flawed people with a lot of love inside of them.
Q: How did you choose the order in which the stories would appear in the collection?
A: On the topic of tonal variety, I thought about the sequencing of stories in the way one might think about ordering a musical album—moving in a non-linear way, having lots of different notes and feelings and ups and downs, moving from flash pieces to longer stories to absurd stories and surreal and realistic ones, to sadness and playfulness and ending somewhere that feels to me, with the last word of the final story, like a kind of arrival.
Originally, the stories were in a different order, but as I felt into them in a more musical way, I could see the story they were all telling together, and could picture, with this final story, all the voices coming together, speaking in a collaborative way.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a novel about female friendship and precarity that lives somewhere in the combined genres of literary-coming-of-age-dark-academia fiction.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m on a book tour, and may be coming to a city near you! Check out my tour dates, times and locations here:
https://www.meghanamysore.com/events
And, the book is also available in audio, on Audible, and wherever you get your audiobooks!
https://www.audible.com/pd/B0H5TV15G6?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow. I’d love it if you gave it a listen; these actors are incredible and brought the book to life.
I can’t wait to share these stories with you.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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